Cleopatra Records calls Shatner Claus a “very special gift of the holidays – the first ever Christmas album from the godfather of dramatic musical interpretations and a legend of stage and screen.” For his part, Shatner sees himself “as an actor with a love of music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013, around the time his prog album Ponder The Mystery was released.

“The spoken word is musical, the rhythm of the words and the musicality of the words is what makes music," Shatner added. "The spoken word should not be any different than the extended notes of music. The fact that I don’t extend the notes? My joshing line is that extending a note is highly overrated.”

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Addressing the suggestion that he was taking part in parody, Shatner countered: “The songs have intrinsic meaning. I was trying to do the meaning while the music played. In fact, I played a theater with Ben Folds in Los Angeles in front of a few thousand people. I did a half hour of songs from our album Has Been. For an encore, I did [my version of] ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ with a finger upraised to the crowd, who were laughing and finally got the number. I left them screaming for half an hour, no exaggeration. They wanted us to come back, but we had nothing left to play.”